Hi we were out of Spain for much of last year and bought a property whilst in UK as undecided where to settle. We then decided to move back to Spain and rent a place.

We do not have to pay any wealth tax as not over the threshold but our accountant has scared us to death with the amount of a possible file for sending it in late. He has told us that as the property is in joint names we are each liable for a fine, also they can decide to count the property as a capital gain in which case we could be taxed around 30K .....genuine mistake as we had sold our house in Spain and are renting here but don´t think that makes any difference.
Has anyone had experience of being fined for late submission

Did you register as fiscal residents when you had your previous property in Spain?

If you are under the threshold for wealth tax you do not have to submit a negative declaration.

If you were previously fiscal residents you could fall foul of the asset declaration law if you have assets outside of the UK in excess of €50.000 in any of three different categories. If you were non-residents this does not apply.

The fines are fairly draconian. I have seen reports that only a very small percentage of people who should have declared have actually done so and am not aware of anyone being fined. I sometimes wonder why I bothered.

Bear in mind the usual caveat that this is a third party web site but it does look fairly accurate. There is a lot more information on various aspects of asset declaration on the internet.

The main danger of detection is bank accounts in the UK with balances over the equivalent of €50.000 because the banks are obliged to disclose details. Houses or other investments are more difficult to track down when starting from cold.

If you are planning to become residents again the decision has to be whether declare now and accept that there may be consequences or just keep quiet about it.

Read of some spanish guy with swiss accounts of was daft enough to declare the intrest but not the asset and got big fines and a few on other expat boards for late or non declaration who were appealing fines cause they were so OTT. Read a few years back that the goverment was been taken to the EU courts over the OTT fines but have never heard anything since

metalmonkey wrote:Hi yes we were fiscal residents as had an SL company for a 12 years. I know we messed up as we did need to declare the asset but wondering what the possible fines may be. thanks

I would consider you fairly dumb to do a late declaration. Wait for them to come to you.

Be a little bit more spanish in your thinking. It's no good going cap in hand, apologising for not declaring, saying you forgot and all that rubbish.

You might get caught, you might not! Take the risk. Be careful of your advisers. Secretly, they're on the side of the authorities - another foreigner screwed gives them great pleasure (even if they're your own nationality!).

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but we filed our first 720 late and were fined 3,000 euros each which would be reduced to 2,250 euros each if we paid immediately and didn't contest the fine. This was four years ago and we are still going through the process of arguing against paying on the basis that we filed as soon as we heard about having to complete a 720. The last we heard from our abogado is that the EU are supposed to be deliberating about (1) Spanish tax residents having to complete the form in the first place and (2) the level of fines the Spanish tax authorities are imposing on late declarations and the withholding of information about assets. We are at the final stage of appeal now waiting on a decision whether we have to pay or not with the next step being going to Court if it is rejected and hoping that the EU come up trumps before it gets to that stage.

At the end of the day ignorance is not bliss and we were in the wrong filing late but as far as we are concerned if the tax office wanted their tax payers to provide this information then they should have sent us a form to complete or at the very least some information about it.

There was a huge amount of publicity and comment about the introduction of asset declaration at the time in the English language media as well as some UK newspapers and on many web sites and internet fora including andalucia.com: